ILISU IS BACK

Hasankeyf threatened again

Germany’s largest civil engineering company, Siemens, is buying a company called VA Tech, which has a contract with the Turkish government to build the Ilisu Dam on the River Tigris in the Kurdish area of Turkey. Siemens plans to go ahead with the dam, perhaps starting work as soon as this summer, in spite of broad local opposition. The mayors of Hasankeyf and nearby Batman have made strong appeals to recent visitors on fact finding missions for help to save Hasankeyf. The mayor of Hasankeyf has recently moved into a limestone cave at Hasankeyf as a protest.

History of the Ilisu Dam Campaign

The people of Hasankeyf and the surrounding area and their supporters in Europe won an important victory in 2002 when a big campaign forced British company Balfour Beatty and other European companies to withdraw from the project. The companies had applied for Export Credit Guarantees from their home governments to help them finance building the Ilisu Dam.

What are the supposed benefits of the dam?

The dam’s main function will be to produce hydro-electric power. There are electricity shortages in Turkey, but the amount of electricity generated will be low compared with Turkey’s overall consumption. There are many other measures that Turkey could take to address this problem: the national grid system is very inefficient and much electricity is “lost”; much could be done to promote energy conservation by the user; Turkey would be ideally placed to exploit new technologies such as wind and solar power. In addition large dams often do not generate as much electricity as anticipated due to problems with silting for example.

better irrigation for local agriculture. However, irrigation benefits are likely to go mainly to already rich big landowners, not to poor small farmers near the river who will lose everything.

What are the problems with building the dam?

It will drown the ancient town of Hasankeyf and many nearby villages, displacing 78,000 people, mainly Kurds, from their homes and farms, and wrecking the environment on which their communities have relied for survival for thousands of years. There has still been no effective consultation with local people.

It will drown hundreds of ancient sites, and much Kurdish and other archaeological heritage.

The dam will have a life of only fifty to seventy years, so for dubious short-term gains thousands of people will lose their homes and livelihoods, and an important and beautiful site will be permanently destroyed.

It will reduce the Kurdish population in the area and create refugees at a time when there is already a serious risk of escalation in the conflict between the Turkish state and the guerrillas of the PKK.

Given the additional control it will give Turkey over the flow of the Tigris, it has the potential to increase tension between Turkey and its downstream neighbour Iraq.

Have the plans changed?

According to Turkish officials the same construction plans as before will be used, and the same area (over 300 km sq) will be flooded; however new resettlement plans are supposed to be being drawn up. There is supposedly a large fund available to “rescue” some parts of the town of Hasankeyf by moving them elsewhere.

This will not help the people who will lose their homes and livelihood, or save the hundreds of archaeological sites from being drowned.

The site forms a whole, as a living space and as a historical area of great beauty, part of it along the riverbed and part high up on the cliffs; this unity would be destroyed by demolishing the town in the valley and moving some relics to another place.

Recent precedents do not bode well: there are no examples of dam projects in Turkey where people have been happily and successfully resettled with acceptable compensation, and the most recent large joint Turkish-European project, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, is already a multi-faceted disaster (see www.baku.org.uk). The possibility of large numbers of ancient buildings being carefully transferred and rehoused without significant damage is low.